Grado MC+ Cartridge
Grado Quality for Mono Analog Enthusiasts: The Absolute Sound Editors' Choice Award-Winning Grado MC+ Cartridge Gets to the Heart of Mono LPs for a Budget Price
There are many analog lovers with record collections that include mono albums. Grado strive to make products that will fit all the needs of the analog enthusiast. A mono cartridge will make your mono records quieter and enhance the musical pleasure of these recordings. Its MC+ phono cartridge uses a 1mil, highly polished elliptical diamond; three-piece OTL cantilever technology and oxygen free wire in the coils for excellent sound at a budget price.
“The Grado Mono is an excellent tracker that fully shows the virtues of mono LPs—sledgehammer bass and excellent imaging.”
—Jacob Heilbrunn, The Absolute Sound, Editors’ Choice Award
Grado's Optimized Transmission Line (OTL) provides an ideal transfer of the signal from point to point, e.g., stylus to cantilever to magnet to coils, etc. This has been achieved by eliminating resonance at each of these key junctions. The transmission line cantilever consists of separate sections that are telescoped into each other. All sections are made of different alloys, some sections hollow, other sections solid. These sections are bonded together with materials that act as dampers, and are coated with a black proprietary material which controls and absorbs resonances that travel on the surface of the cantilever (known as skin effects). The OTL stylus/cantilever design will make your records sound quieter, improve the height, width, and depth of the soundstage, and offer more detail than previously obtainable.
The Pivoted Fixed Axial Cantilever Stylus-Generator is basically quite simple. The 'OTL' cantilever shaft is brought to a fixed axial pivot that supports the entire cantilever assembly. A miniature element attached to the end of the cantilever is allowed to move freely within the lines of flux of a stationary magnetand coil structure. This system of support is mechanically more accurate (more linear) than conventional 'teeter-totter' designs that utilize an iron armature to balance the mass of the cantilever. The teeter-totter design is supported in the center with a rubber donut mounting. The fixed axial design has a very low tip mass, which results in lower distortion, improved transient response, and longer record life.
The Flux-Bridger Generator System design uses four separate magnetic gaps that the miniature element of the cantilever bridges. The miniature element moves between opposing flux gaps creating an increase in flux in one gap while reducing it in the other. The four separate magnetic gaps create a highly efficient and perfectly balanced system. This design requires fewer coil turns than conventional designs. Fewer coil turns allow Grado cartridges to have lower mass and lower electrical inductance, making them insensitive to tone arm cable capacitance. The four gap design is perfectly balanced and eliminates magnetic residue which contributes to increasing distortion over longer time periods. Grado cartridges reduce distortions that cause listener fatigue.
Each individual cartridge manufactured by Grado is hand assembled and tested for frequency response, channel output, channel balance, phase linearity, inductance and resistance. This meticulous care in design and construction lavished on each Grado cartridge contributes to an unchallenged consistency of performance and guarantee of reliability.
